Chapter 3
The properties of language
Human is not the only creature which is capable of communicating. All
creatures, from apes. bees, cicadas, dolphins, are capable of
communicating with other members of their
species.
Communicative versus informative
We should first distinguish what are communicative signals from those
which may be unintentionally informative signals. A person listening to
you may become informed about you via a number of signals which you
have not intentionally sent, may note that you have a cold (you sneezed),
that you aren't at ease (you shifted around in your seat), that you are
disorganized (non-matching socks), and that you from some other part of
the country (you have a strange accent). However, when you use
language to tell this person, "I would like to apply for the vacant position
of senior brain surgeon at the hospital," you are normally considered to be
intentionally communicating something. By the same token, the blackbird
is not normally taken to be communicating anything having black
feathers, perching on a branch and eating a warm, but is considered to be
sending a communicative signal with the loud squawking when a cat
appears on the scene.
Unique properties
There have been a number of attempts to determine the defining
properties of human language, and different lists of features can be found.
We shall take six of these features and describe how they are manifested
in human language. We shall also try to describe in what ways these
features are uniquely a part of human language and unlikely to be found
in the communication systems of other creatures.
We can now consider some the properties which the bipeds believe are
unique to their linguistic
systems .
The properties which differentiate human language from all other
Languages and which make it a unique type of communication
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1. Displacement
When your pet cat comes home after spending a night in the back alleys
and stands at your feet calling meow, you are likely to understand this
message as relating to that immediate time and place. If you ask the cat
where it was the night before and what it was up to, you may get the same
meow response. It seems that animal communication is almost
exclusively designed for its moment, here and now. It can not effectively
be used to relate events which are far removed in time and place. When
your dog says GRRR, it is likely ,I mean GRRR, right now because it
does not appear capable of communicating
GRRR last night, over in the park. Now, human language users are
capable of producing messages equivalent to GRRR, last night,
going on to say "In fact, I'll be going back tomorrow ".They can refer to
past and future time, and to other locations. This property
of human language is called displacement. It allows the users
to talk about things and events not present in the immediate
moment. Animal communication is generally considered to lack this
property ..
However, it has been proposed that bee communication does have the
property of displacement. For example, when a worker bee finds a source
of
nectar and returns to the hive, it can perform a complex dance routine to
communicate to the other bees the location of this nectar. Depending on
the type of dance (round dance for nearby and tail-wagging dance, with
variable tempo, for further away and how far), the other bees can work
out where this newly discovered feast can be found. This ability of the
bee to indicate a location some distance away must mean that bee
communication has at least some degree of displacement as a feature. The
crucial consideration involved, of course, is that of degree. Bee
communication has displacement in an extremely limited form. Certainly,
the bee can direct other bees to a food source. However, it must be the
most recent food source. It can not be that rose garden on the other side of
town that we visited last weekend, nor can it be, as far as we know,
possible future nectar in bee heaven .
The factors involved in the property of displacement, as it is manifested
in human language, are much more comprehensive than the
communication of a single location. It enables us to talk about things and
places whose existence we can not even be sure of. We can refer to
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mythical creatures, demons, fairies, angels, Santa Claus, and recently
invented characters such as Superman. It is the property of displacement
that allows the human, unlike any other creature, to create fiction and to
describe possible future worlds .
2. Arbitrariness
It is generally the case that there is no 'natural' connection between a
linguistic form and its meaning. Recognizing this general fact about
language leads us to conclude that a property of linguistic signs is their
arbitrary relationship with the objects they are used to indicate. The
forms of human language demonstrate a property called arbitrariness:
they do not, in any way, 'fit' the objects they denote.
However ,there are some words in language which have sounds which
seem to 'echo' the sounds of objects or activities. English examples might
be cuckoo, CRASH, slurp, squelch or whirr, which are onomatopoeic. In
most languages, however, these onomatopoeic words are relatively rare,
and the vast majority of linguistic expressions are arbitrary.
For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it. This
impression we have of the non-arbitrariness of animal signaling may be
closely connected with the fact that, for any animal, the set of signals
used
in
communication is finite. That is, each variety of animal communication
consists of a fixed and limited set of (vocal or gestural) forms. Many of
these
forms are used only in specific situations (e.g. establishing territory) and
at
particular times (e.g. during the mating season).
3. Productivity
It is a feature of all languages that novel utterances are continually being
created. A child learning language is especially active in forming and producing utterances which he or she has never heard before. With adults,
new situations arise or new objects have to be described, so the languageusers manipulate their linguistic resources to produce new expressions
and new sentences! This property of human language has been termed
productivity (or 'creativity', or 'open-endedness'). It is an aspect of
language which is linked to the fact that the potential number of
utterances in any human language is infinite.
Non-human signaling, in contrast , appears to have little flexibility.
Cicadas have four signals to choose from and vervet monkeys have about
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thirty-six vocal calls (including the noises for vomiting and sneezing).
Nor does it seem possible for animals to produce 'new' signals to
communicate novel experiences or events. The worker bee, normally able
to communicate the location of a nectar source, will fail to do so if the
location is really 'new'. In one experiment, a hive of bees was placed at
the foot of a radio tower and a food source at the top. Ten bees were
taken to the top, shown the food source, and sent off to tell the rest of the
hive about their find. The message was conveyed via a bee dance and the
whole gang buzzed off to get the free food. They flew around in all
directions, but couldn't locate the food. The problem may be that bee
communication regarding location has a fixed set of signals, all of which
relate to horizontal distance. The bee can not manipulate its
communication system to create a 'new' message indicating vertical
distance.
The problem seems to be that animal signals have a feature called fixed
reference. Each signal is fixed as relating to a particular object or
occasion.
4. cultural transmission
While you may inherit brown eyes and dark hair from your parents, you
do not inherit their language. You acquire language and culture with other
speakers and not from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents
who have never left Korea and speak only Korean, which is adopted and
brought up from birth by English speakers in the United States, may have
physical characteristics inherited from its natural parents, but it will
inevitably speak English.
This process whereby language is passed on from one generation to the
next is described as cultural transmission. While it has been argued that
humans are born with an innate predisposition to acquire language , it is
clear that they are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a
specific language, such as English .The general pattern of animal
communication is that the signals used are instinctive and not learned.
Human infants, growing up in isolation, produce no 'instinctive' language.
Cultural transmission of a specific language is crucial in the
human acquisition process.
5 Discreteness
The sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct. For example, the
difference between a /b/ sound and a /p/ sound is not actually very great,
but when these sounds are part of a language like English, they are used
in such a way that the occurrence of one rather than the other is
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meaningful. The fact that the pronunciation of the forms pack and back
leads to a distinction
in meaning can only be due to the difference between the /p/ and /b/
sounds in English .This property of language is described as discreteness.
Each sound in the language is treated as discrete.
6. Duality
Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. This
property is called duality, or 'double articulation'. In terms of speech
production, we have the physical level at which we can produce
individual sounds, like /n/, /b/ and /i/. As individual sounds, none of these
discrete forms has any intrinsic meaning. When we produce those sounds
in a particular combination, as in bin, we have another level producing
meaning which is different from the meaning of the combination in nib.
So, at one level, we have distinct sounds, and, at another level, we have
distinct meanings .This duality of levels is, in fact, one of the most
economical features of human language, since with a limited set of
distinct sounds we are capable of producing a very large number of sound
combinations (e.g. words) which are distinct in meaning.
Other properties
1. The use of the vocal-auditory channel is a feature
of human speech. Human linguistic communication is typically generated
via the vocal organs and perceived via the ears. Linguistic
communication,
however, can also be transmitted without sound, via writing or via the
sign
languages of the deaf. Moreover, many other species (e.g. dolphins) use
the
vocal-auditory channel. Thus, this property is not a defining feature of
human language.
2. Reciprocity :any speaker/sender of a linguistic signal can also be a
listener/receiver.
3.Specialization :linguistic signals do not normally serve any other type
of purpose, such as breathing or feeding.
4.Non-directionality: linguistic signals can be picked up by anyone within
hearing, even unseen.
5. Rapid fade: linguistic signals are produced and disappear quickly
6. Prevarication:
lying and deception, which appear to be particularly human traits, may
have prompted Charles Hockett (1963) to include them (in technical
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terms, as prevarication) as a possible property of human language. In
discussing this property, he claimed that "linguistic messages can be
false" while "lying seems extremely rare among animals".
Most of these are properties of the spoken language, but not of the
written language. They are also not present in animal communication
systems which characteristically use the visual mode or involve frequent
repetition of the same signal.
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Chapter 4
Animals and human language
* Can Non- humans understand human language?
In fact, animals may produce particular behaviors in response to a
particular sound stimulus, but do not actually 'understand' the meaning of
the word uttered.
If it seems difficult to conceive animals 'understanding' human language,
then it appears to be even less likely that an animal would be capable of
'producing' human language.
Chimpanzees and language
A chimpanzee does have 99% of its basic genetics in common with the
human.
The idea of raising a chimpanzee and a child together may seem like a
nightmare, but this is basically what was done in an early attempt to teach
a chimpanzee to use human language.
In the 1930s, two scientists (Luella and Winthrop Kellogg) reported on
their experiences of raising an infant chimpanzee together with their
infant son. The chimpanzee, called Gua, was reported to be able to
understand about a hundred words, but did not 'say' any of them. In the
1940s, a chimpanzee named Viki was reared by another scientist couple
(Catherine and Keith Hayes) in their own home, exactly as if she were a
human child. These foster parents spent five years attempting to get Viki
to 'say' English words by trying to shape her mouth as she produced
sounds. Viki eventually managed to produce some 'words', rather poorly
articulated versions of mama, papa and cup. In retrospect, this was a
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remarkable achievement since it has become clear that non-human
primates do not have a physically structured vocal tract which is suitable
for producing human speech sounds. Apes and gorillas can, like
chimpanzees, communicate with a wide range of vocal calls, but they just
can not speak.
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